Reasons for Innovation: Legitimizing Resource Mobilization for Innovation in the Case of Okochi Memorial Prize Winners

This paper addresses reasons for innovation. Innovation requires resources to transform new ideas into products/services to be sold in the market and diffused in society. Yet in the earlier stage of innovation process uncertainty always prevails both technologically and economically. There is no objective consensus that the new idea will succeed in the end. It is thus necessary for those people who want to realize the innovation to show others both inside and outside the firm legitimate reasons for mobilizing their precious resources, including people, materials, facilities, and money, throughout the process toward commercialization. How do firms legitimize the resource mobilization for innovation? Drawing on 18 case studies on Okochi Memorial Prize winners, which our joint research project has carried out over last five years, and building upon the existing literature on internal corporate venturing, new ventures, and other related issues, this paper examines the innovation process of established Japanese firms from idea generation to commercialization with a primary focus on the process by which resource mobilization was legitimized.

Commercialization of Government Funded R&D : Follow-up Research Survey on NEDO Research Projects

Drawing on data obtained from the questionnaire survey for the 242 private R&D projects supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization), Japan’s public management organization promoting R&D, this paper explores how the private R&D projects’ dependence on public supports affects their R&D processes and, in turn, projects’ performance and the commercialization of developed technologies. Our analyses show that dependence on government resources gives rise to some —isolation. of the projects from the other parts of companies that they belong to. Such isolation, mainly derived from projects’ unique positions in —double dependence. structures, negatively affects R&D performance especially related to commercialization. First, high dependence on public resources prevents project members from interacting with people outside the projects within the company. This precludes the projects to effectively leverage internal resources in overcoming technological problems. Secondly, high dependence weakens governance or control on project’s activities by internal management. This deters development of commercialization technologies and makes it difficult for the projects to acquire legitimacy for further investment towards commercialization. Our findings suggest that both companies and public funding agencies should promote projects to keep intimate relationships with the other parts of their organization for successful R&D leading to commercialization.

Capabilities of technology utilization and technology integration : Impact of 3D technologies on product development process and performance

Multi-functional technologies widely influence on organization and often require organizational technology integration capabilities to achieve the total effectiveness. Technology integration capability here implies not only utilizing technologies in the present setting of organizational environment but also reforming organizational process and structure towards total optimization. This paper aims to exam technology integration capabilities among Japanese and Chinese firms through questionnaire surveys regarding impact of 3D technologies on product development process and performance. The results indicated that Japanese companies improved their total performance with process reformation leveraged by 3D technologies; however, among Chinese companies, no significant relationships were observed among 3D technology usage, process reformation and the total performance improvement although they improve the partial performance such as manufacturability by utilizing the technologies. Chinese companies, which have a huge growing market and are on the process of rapidly improving their productivities without strong organizational inertia, could have enough advantage by utilizing technologies to improve the partial performance. On the other hand, Japanese companies, which compete in mature market and have already had highly efficient organizational process, could not find the merits of technology usage without technology integration capabilities. This would be regarded as disadvantage of process-advanced company that they cannot have enough incentive to introduce advanced technology and new entries have a chance to leap-frog the advanced companies in usage of technology in general.

Determinants of Microlithography Industry Leadership: The Possibility of Collaboration and Outsourcing

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons why Japanese microlithography manufacturers lost their competitiveness in the latter half of the 90's mainly based on the field interviews and publicly available data. Especially, we shall focus on the following four possible determinants of competitiveness in this industry: 1) Characteristics of the major units (including software) that composemicrolithography,and the methods of their production and procurement. 2) Inter-firm R&D collaboration for new product development; 3) Product architecture and the other ways of incorporating product quality; 4) Changes in demand for microlithography and the marketing strategies of each company to adapt to such demand changes. Many people mention that the rapid growth of ASML can be scribed to their extensive strategies of outsourcing and R&D collaboration, and that the modular product architecture enabled them to carry out such strategies. However,we will discuss how such an explanation is not necessarily appropriate. ASML's current position has been established but not because of their extensive use of outsourcing; the modular product architecture was not a major source of their ompetitiveness either.We are not saying that the competitiveness of Nikon and Canon have weakened just as a result of the transitory process of the ordinary business cycle. Rather,we found deeper structural factors that caused problems for the two Japanese companies. While the manufacturing industry is being transformed from an engineering-based to a science-based one, vertically integrated Japanese R&D systems, like Nikon's or Canon's,have begun to exhibit serious drawbacks to innovation.

Knowledge transfer across generations : the impact on product development performance in the automobile industry

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-264).by Yaichi Aoshima.Ph.D